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“Puck, Mabel needs you to calm down right now!”
The Hyde freezes, his eyes snapping to me. “My belle.”
Thank the gods…
“You’ll get your chance to kill the ones who took your belle, but only if you let them get close, understand? So you have to stay calm.”
Puck starts shaking, but his enormous eyes don’t leave me. There’s a trace of rationality in his gaze now. Beastly’s too. It’s not sanity because the Hydes have never been sane, but I can see a focused intensity that shows their minds have started working past their rage and fear again.
And sure, it’s the kind of focused intensity that would string the traders’ teeth into a necklace, but I’ll take what I can get.
Ghastly mutters about pretty tooth necklaces for Mabel. I ignore him.
“Did you see where they took her?” I ask Puck.
The Hyde lifts one long arm and points his knife-like finger toward the door on the righthand side of the room.
Relief makes air rush from my chest. She’s here, then. I can’t let myself imagine what they might be doing to her—I’ll lose control of Ghastly if I consider that for too long—but she’s here and that’s a start.
“Okay, good. Now, did you see how they control these cages? Is there a key or a code or?—”
The double doors open.
Six guys walk in dressed in khakis like zookeepers. Ghastly snarls in my mind at the pretense, the arrogance. It’s on purpose, I know. A show to intimidate us and to create a sense of danger and wildness for buyers too.
And it probably means they’re going to hold an auction soon. Maybe not here, not if we’re in the fucking loading dock, but somewhere, and they want the buyers to feel like they’re getting rare animals.
Not living sentient beings with hopes and dreams and thoughts of their own, no. Never that.
Just rare animals, all without the trouble of traveling to far-off lands or actually risking anything.
Ghastly shivers through my skin, wanting to show them just how wild we can be, and I take a breath, reminding him that we need to stay calm. Need to stay focused.
We can’t kill them all, not yet. We need to know where Mabel is first.
And we need to get out of these fucking cages.
”I see one of you is trying to pretend to look human,” one of the men says, his tone bored. From the way the others are reacting to him, I’m guessing he’s the sick fucker in charge. “You really do enjoy that game, don’t you? As if you could hide what you are.”
“Where is she?” I demand.
The man smirks. “Only something like you freaks would want a hideous cunt like that.”
It gets harder to control Ghastly—and harder to want to try. But we have to be smart. We have to be…
Gods, I’ll make them eat their own tongues.
The guy in charge saunters up to the cage. “Don’t you worry about your little freak. Our crew’s keeping her entertained. By the time we’re done, she won’t even remember you.”
Puck screams, his voice like knives grating over metal. Beastly roars, grabbing the bars and howling when the electricity burns him. The smell of scorched fur joins the stench of concrete and sweat in the air.
I stay quiet, my body shaking all over, while Ghastly seethes beneath my skin, cataloging all of the ways he’ll make these men pay for touching her.
I’m on board with each and every one.
“She’s your mate, isn’t she?” the man continues. “All of you, sharing the same bitch. Couldn’t find anyone else to touch your cocks, eh?” He smirks as his buddies come closer, cattle prods in their hands. “You want to know how she’s begging for it? How she’s on the ground like an animal for us? Or how about what her new owner will do once we sell her?”
Everything Huck suffered, everything I’ve seen over and over again in all these years of rescuing people from the traders, flashes through my mind in an instant.
